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Corn Flakes Were Invented as Part of an Anti-Masturbation Crusade

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Western world worked itself up into a mass hissy fit over the idea of people touching themselves. Judeo-Christian tradition had already been damning masturbation as a misuse of sexuality for ages, but Victorian era prudishness and the Great Awakening and other religious revivals in America created a perfect storm for people to really get obsessed with it.

Books like the anonymously authored Ononia: Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences... and Samuel Tissot's Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism [masturbation]laid the groundwork for medicalizing “the solitary vice.” Soon, masturbation was no longer just a moral failing, but also a physical and mental ailment that required treatment and cures.

Kellogg's Cures

Library of Congress

In the young United States, one of the most ardent anti-masturbaters was a Michigan physician named John Harvey Kellogg. The good doctor was a bit uncomfortable about sex, thinking it detrimental to physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. He personally abstained from it, and never consummated his marriage (and may have actually spent his honeymoon working on one of his anti-sex books). He and his wife kept separate bedrooms and adopted all of their children.

Sex with your wife was bad, but masturbation was even worse. “If illicit commerce of the sexes is a heinous sin,” Kellogg wrote, “self-pollution is a crime doubly abominable.” In Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life, he cataloged 39 different symptoms of a person plagued by masturbation, including general infirmity, defective development, mood swings, fickleness, bashfulness, boldness, bad posture, stiff joints, fondness for spicy foods, acne, palpitations, and epilepsy.

Kellogg’s solution to all this suffering was a healthy diet. He thought that meat and certain flavorful or seasoned foods increased sexual desire, and that plainer food, especially cereals and nuts, could curb it. While working as the superintendent at Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, he hit upon a few different healthy eating ideas. Two became breakfast staples and one (thankfully) didn’t.

It's All in the Diet

Early in his tenure at the sanitarium, Kellogg created a “health treat” for the patients that consisted of oatmeal and corn meal baked into biscuits and then ground into tiny pieces. He called it “granula.” This was maybe the worst name imaginable, since a very similar product with the exact same name was already being made and sold by James Caleb Jackson, another dietary reformer. Under the threat of a lawsuit, Kellogg changed the name of his creation to “granola.”

Another of Kellogg’s dietary innovations, developed to ensure clean intestines, was an enema machine that ran water through the bowel and then followed it with a pint of yogurt—half delivered through the mouth and the other half through the anus. This one didn't really catch on.

Later, Kellogg developed a few different flaked grain breakfast cereals—including corn flakes—as healthy, ready-to-eat anti-masturbatory morning meals. He partnered with his brother Will, the sanitarium’s bookkeeper, to make and sell them to the public. Will had less interest in dietary purity and more business sense than his brother, and worried that the products wouldn’t sell as they were. He wanted to add sugar to the flakes to make them more palatable, but John wouldn’t hear of it. Will eventually started selling the cereals through his own business, which became the Kellogg Company; the brothers continued to feud for decades after. Masturbators who enjoy cornflakes can probably attest that the sugar was a good idea, since Kellogg's cereal doesn't really have its intended effect.

While cereals and yogurt enemas might have kept most people in line, Kellogg also supported more extreme measures (read: stuff that would get your medical license revoked today and lead to many, many lawsuits) for people with particularly nasty masturbation habits. For boys, he suggested threading silver wire through the foreskin to prevent erections and cause irritation. For girls, he advocated, and sometimes employed, an application of carbolic acid to the clitoris to burn it and discourage touching it.

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